Police officers responding to a deadly shooting inside the business school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, mistook the gunman for a bystander and urged him to get out of the building amid the frantic search for the suspect and victims, according to body camera footage and police accounts.
With their weapons drawn, the two Las Vegas police officers climbed stairs to a second-floor walkway overlooking the ground floor of the business school during the Dec. 6 shooting that left three professors dead and one wounded on the 30,000-student campus.
The shooter, later identified as 67-year-old Anthony Polito, appears for only a few moments in more than five hours of footage made public Wednesday, but the video provides the first look at the suspect in the building after opening fire on the top floors of the five-story business school.
When the rampage began, students and staff had been eating lunch and playing games in a large courtyard just outside the business school, which sits across from the university's student union.
The video shows Polito wearing a long black trench coat over a white shirt and moving calmly through the first floor of the business school as officers swarmed the building. One of his hands was visible at his side, and there was no indication he had a gun.
"Get out! Get out!" the officers shouted at Polito while pointing to an exit and continuing along the walkway.
Clark County Undersheriff Andrew Walsh told The Associated Press on Thursday that it is apparent the two officers did not know they encountered the gunman inside the building.
"They don't have a description of the shooter at the time, and they know there are other police resources on the first floor," he said.
About a minute later, Polito exited the building, pulled his weapon and was killed in a shootout with university police officers, according to authorities. No one outside was harmed.
The body camera footage released Wednesday did not include the shootout. But a short video that Sheriff Kevin McMahill released earlier this month showed Polito descending a set of stairs outside the business school, his long black coat swaying.
In that video, one of the university police officers approached Polito from behind, but when the shooter turned around, weapon in hand, the officer dove for cover behind a patrol car. McMahill said when he released the video that the university officers also did not initially know they had encountered the gunman.
Police have not specified a motive for the shooting but said Polito was in financial trouble and had been turned down for a teaching job at UNLV and other Nevada schools. He left a tenured post in 2017 at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, after teaching business there for more than 15 years.
The three professors killed at UNLV were Naoko Takemaru, 69, an author and associate professor of Japanese studies; Cha Jan "Jerry" Chang, 64, an associate professor in the business school's Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology department; and Patricia Navarro Velez, 39, an accounting professor focusing on research in cybersecurity disclosures and data analytics.
The wounded victim, a 38-year-old visiting professor, has not been identified.
Police said more body camera footage will be released in coming weeks.
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